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Early Life, 1889–1908, and the Exclusionary Period

  • JR Henneman, Director and Curator, Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Denver Art Museum

Born in 1889, Tokio Ueyama spent the first eighteen years of his life in Japan. He left in 1908 and arrived in the United States during the Exclusionary Period (1882–1952), called such because of immigration restrictions aimed at people of Asian descent, who were barred from becoming naturalized American citizens.1 Chinese immigrants were the first to arrive in large groups in the US beginning in the 1840s. Anti-Chinese sentiment eventually resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law restricting immigration to the US.2

While Japanese immigrants were present in the US by the 1880s, after the Chinese Exclusion Act increasing numbers of Japanese immigrants filled the labor void. They faced discrimination similar to that directed at Chinese immigrants. The 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the US effectively ended Japanese immigration, though wives, children, and parents of existing immigrants could enter the country. The 1913 Alien Land Laws in California and Arizona prohibited Asian immigrant males from purchasing or owning land. Even though Ueyama could not obtain official citizenship nor own land, he (like many) established a life and career amid Japanese communities along the West Coast.3 The 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act) halted all immigration of Japanese, among many other nationalities, into the US. This ban would not be lifted until 1952 with the McCarran-Walter Act (Immigration and Nationality Act).4

Notes

  1. A 1790 Congressional decree disallowed citizenship to Asian-born people. In 1873, Congress declared that people of African descent could be eligible for citizenship; all Asian immigrants remained ineligible. Those born on American soil were citizens, meaning that first-generation Japanese immigrants (Issei) were not eligible for citizenship though their children (Nisei), if born on US soil, were. ↩︎

  2. The law provided a ten-year absolute ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the US. ↩︎

  3. As Karin Higa writes, “While American anti-Asian sentiment was consolidated in the legislative arena, Chinese and Japanese immigrants solidified their communities and planted firm roots in the American soil.” Higa, “Some Notes on an Asian American Art History,” in With New Eyes: Toward an Asian American Art History in the West (San Francisco: San Francisco State University), 13. ↩︎

  4. Regarding this history of exclusion, see the “Timeline of Japanese American History,” Japanese American National Museum, September 2021, https://www.janm.org/sites/default/files/2021-12/janm-education-resources-common-ground-previsit-timeline-and-vocabulary-2021.pdf; and Higa, “Some Notes on an Asian American Art History,” 13. ↩︎